My local newspaper, the Valley News, interviewed me a few days ago, and you can read the whole thing here. It’s a very good piece that stays true to the facts, and I enjoyed sitting for the questions (with journalist Sarah Earle) and the pictures (with photographer Rick Russell) very much.
Category: shameless self-promotion.
An interview and a weekend trip
Here’s an interview with me over on Paul Semel’s blog, in which I talk about the ideas and motivations behind AFTERSHOCKS and the general world-building and setup of the Palladium Wars universe.
I spent part of the weekend in New York City, to have lunch with my editor and take the German nephew along so he could see the Big City. NYC in August is….not my favorite time and place in the world, I have to say. It’s hot, full of tourists (especially Midtown, which is where the visitors I bring along invariably want to go too), and we got there on trash day, which means the olfactory experience was spectacular. But it still has its charms, and some things about NYC will never get old for me. Like the view from the observation deck of the Empire State Building:
And the building itself is beautiful, of course.
There’s an Amazon Bookstore right across the street from the lobby entrance of the Empire State Building, so naturally I had to go check it out and get the rare pleasure of seeing one of my books on the shelf of a bookstore. (B&N and BAM won’t stock my books because 47North is an Amazon imprint, so I don’t usually see my name in a dead-tree store.)
Another cool thing about browsing the SF/F section was seeing the names of lots of friends on the book covers. I get a kick out of that every time I go into a bookstore, even if it’s one where my stuff is not on the shelf. It’s fun to be able to put so many faces to names and be happy for their successes.
Aftershocks release day!
AFTERSHOCKS, the first book in my new SF series called “The Palladium Wars”, is out today!
It’s available on Amazon in Kindle, Audible, trade paperback, and hardcover forms. And if you are a Prime member in the US, the Kindle version is available to you free to read for the month of July as part of the Prime Reading program.
(If you are a Prime member and you pre-ordered the Kindle version already, don’t get too upset about not getting to read it for free like those late-to-the-party Prime Reading bandwagon jumpers. I get royalties from the pre-sales, so I’ll be able to write more books, and you get to keep the Kindle book even if you maxed out your Prime Reading borrowing library because you own it for good.)
I am about to turn in the second novel, called BALLISTIC, which is scheduled to be released in June of next year. And for those of you who kept asking on Twitter and via email: there will be another Frontlines novel, I will be writing it between now and the end of the year, and it will be out next year as well. In the meantime, I am writing on a Frontlines novella to be released in a few weeks, and there will be at least one more Frontlines story out on the Kindle after that before the next novel comes out.
The novella I am currently writing has been a great way to get my head back into the Frontlines universe after spending a year and a half with the characters in the Palladium Wars system. I hope you’ll enjoy what’s coming in the next year.
Aftershocks giveaway on Goodreads
AFTERSHOCKS, the first novel in my new series THE PALLADIUM WARS, will be out on July 1. My publisher, 47North, is giving away 100 ebook copies via Goodreads, and if you live in the U.S., you can throw your hat into that ring from May 31 until June 30:
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/292827-aftershocks
Interplanetary strife! Corporate intrigue! Ancient grudges! Shadowy conspiracies! Firefights and space battles! And yours for the low, low price of FREE…if you manage to snag one of the 100 copies they’re giving away.
“How To Move Spheres And Influence People,” a new Wild Cards novelette
My Wild Cards novelette “How To Move Spheres And Influence People” is up at Tor.com today. It’s free to read, like all the stuff at Tor.com, so if you are inclined, I welcome you to check it out and let me know what you think.
“Spheres” kind of muscled its way into my writing schedule unbidden when the character of T.K. and the nature of her ace power just popped into my head one day. It was one of those rare and magic things where the story mostly writes itself. I am pretty happy with the way the story turned out, and I hope you will like it too.
The gorgeous cover art is by the inimitable John Picacio. (This story marks my first Picacio cover, so I get to check that off my bucket list today.)
Where to find “Shape-Shifters” and “Lucky 13”
I’ve had more than a few people asking where they can read the two stories of mine that were used for the (amazingly done) episodes in Tim Miller and David Fincher’s “Love Death + Robots” on Netflix.
Episode 10 of Love Death + Robots, “Shape-shifters”, is based on my short story “On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare”, which you can find here on Amazon in DRM-free Kindle format.
Episode 13 of Love, Death & Robots, “Lucky 13”, is based on my short story “Lucky Thirteen”, a story in the Frontlines universe. You can find it here on Amazon, in Kindle and Audible formats.
Lucky Thirteen has been out since the early days of Frontlines, and many readers have downloaded and read Halley’s rookie pilot story already.
“On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare” has never been published anywhere before today, but a lot of people have asked for an opportunity to get their hands on it, so I decided to make it available the same way I offered up Lucky Thirteen a few years back, via Kindle Direct. (The Kindle version is DRM-free and has lending enabled.)
Interview with me over at The Verge
Andrew Liptak at The Verge interviewed me about my new series, The Palladium Wars. I go a little bit into the world-building for the new story, and how my week at the Launch Pad astronomy workshop in 2017 helped to make the new series more scientifically grounded.
With the publication of the interview, the cover for AFTERSHOCKS, the first book in the series (out on July 1), is now public, so here it is in all its glory. It’s very different from any of the Frontlines covers in art style, which is intentional. Frontlines is a first-person story that’s limited to the scope of one point of view. Palladium Wars is a multi-POV narrative with a much bigger scope, and the cover is supposed to reflect that.
AFTERSHOCKS will be available in paperback, Kindle, and <drumroll> HARDCOVER. This is my first book to get the hardcover treatment. There will of course be an Audible version as well, and I am happy to report that it will be narrated by the awesomely talented Luke Daniels, who has been the voice for all the Frontlines novels so far.
Points of Impact is out TO-DAY.
It’s January 9th today, which means that POINTS OF IMPACT is now out on Kindle, in paperback, and in Audible audiobook format (read once again by the amazing Luke Daniels). If you pre-ordered the book, it should show up on your Kindle or in your Audible library AT THIS VERY MOMENT AS IF BY MAGIC, or in your physical mailbox whenever your delivery guy comes around.
I hope you enjoy the sixth installment of Andrew Grayson’s story. POINTS OF IMPACT picks up two years after the events of FIELDS OF FIRE, and Andrew is still fighting the long fight, trying to pry the Lankies loose from what’s left of Mars, where troops and equipment get ground down at an alarming rate because neither people nor machines were designed for years of constant combat deployments under harsh conditions. (If that sounds familiar somehow, it’s probably a total coincidence.)
Enjoy your preorder, or pick up a fresh copy, and don’t mind me while I sit in a corner over here today and engage in the traditional ritual of anxiously refreshing the Amazon page every thirty seconds…
Low Chicago
So I have something pretty wicked to show you today.
Remember how I mentioned that my first Wild Cards novella in the U.S. will be out in June as part of a novel called LOW CHICAGO?
Well, the final cover of LOW CHICAGO is in, and it’s freaking glorious. Not just because it’s cool by itself, which it definitely is…but because the cover character is mine. He’s called Khan, and he’s the protagonist of the novella “Stripes”, which is part of that book. This is the first Wild Cards character I got to create, and he’s probably the most fun to write of all the fictional people who sit around in the fiction casting office in my brain. He’s a joker-ace, which means that his Wild Cards mutation makes him look inhuman but also gives him great powers. What kind of mutation, you ask? Well, let me show you the cover:
That is a pretty beastly cover, I think. (Pun intended.) The artwork was done by Michael Komarck.
LOW CHICAGO will be out on July 16th, and the other stories in the volume were written by John Jos. Miller, Saladin Ahmed, Paul Cornell, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Christopher Rowe, and Melinda M. Snodgrass. It’s part of what we call the American Triad, but it’s a stand-alone volume, so you don’t have to have read the entire series to know what’s going on in this one.
Six days to Points of Impact, and a Frontlines Kindle sale
POINTS OF IMPACT was picked by the Amazon Books editors to be a featured “Best Books of the Month” selection for January. It will be released officially on January 9, which is in…uh, six days already. Yikes.
But that’s not all, friends and neighbors. Over at Crazy Jeff’s Electronic Book Emporium (a.k.a. the Kindle store), the other five books of the Frontlines series are on sale for $1.99 each for the entire month of January. That’s five books for ten bucks total, which means that if someone wanted to buy the whole series on Kindle, they’d be out only $14.94 this month.
Tell your friends and family, tell your car mechanic, tell that weird guy on the street corner who yells at passing bikes. THEY’RE GOOD BOOKS, BRENT.